Manufacturing a scientific scandal

Photo credit: GetUp

How many of you read or heard about Clive Hamilton’s article on climate contrarians in Australia? It was a 5-part piece that was published at the ABC’s Unleashed site a couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d linked to it here but it looks like I missed it after all.

1: Bullying, lies and the rise of climate denial
2: Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?
3: Think tanks, oil money and black ops
4: Manufacturing a scientific scandal
5: Who’s defending science?

It’s a fascinating look at the people opposing climate change action in Australia. Hamilton, the author of Affluenza and now a Greens candidate for the next election, started researching them after hearing about all the death threats and hate mail that’s been directed at climate scientists and journalists over the last year or so.

Hamilton finds that there are essentially two groups of climate contrarians. The first is made up of politically-motivated individuals who aren’t all that interested in climate science, although they love to look for typos and mistakes in the work of climatologists. They’re the ones behind the hate mail and who spam every comment field on the internet, preventing honest discussion of the issues.

In my opinion, they’re acting out of fear. They like their lives just fine as they are, and oppose any change to it. I don’t think there’s any point arguing the science with them. I think it’s better to talk about what a bright green future could be like, showing the positive changes that would happen if we had smarter, cleaner energy systems and reduced the wastefulness of society. And there’s more to be gained from talking to undecided people than the dyed-in-the-wool anti’s.

The other group of climate contrarians are the fossil fuel lobby and their PR hacks. Most of those PR people used to work for tobacco companies, so they’ve got a lot of practice at delaying community action on toxic substances. They’re the ones with the cash and the influence to get laws passed, and the ones hacking into university emails to manufacture controversy.

And in my opinion, they’re using the first group to provide cover for their anti-democratic actions. They’re the ones pushing to log native forests, to open new coal mines and power plants, to fish the oceans until they’re empty. As long as they might make a single lousy buck, they’ll keep taking from our common heritage and polluting what’s left. They’re the ones we need to oppose most strongly.

Anyway, Hamilton has all the details you could possibly need – the articles are long, but they’re well worth a look to find out the names of the people involved in selling our future up the river. I don’t recommend reading the comments – they’re just ludicrous and merely serve as an example of what Hamilton’s talking about.